Research Question

Lesson

Elijah Galvan

September 1, 2023

3 min read

Goal During this Stage

To develop a clear research question that goes to higher-level (i.e. psychological) function.

How to Achieve this Goal

Keep focusing what you are interested until you can articulate the question that you want to answer in a single sentance that a 10 year old can understand.

Note

As a prerequisite for conducting research, we are often told that we must have a clear research question and a design that allows us to answer that question. In practice many people abide by this but, in my personal experience, some do not: some researchers prefer to come up with an experiment that they think is interesting, hypothesize about behavior that they expect to observe in that experiment, and, only after collecting data, speculate as to what the underlying psychological motivation for that behavior was. It’s a potentially wasteful and inefficient way to conduct research, but I can personally attest to the fact that I have observed people successfully complete Master’s, Ph.D.’s, and Postdocs with this logic. The ability to work backwards is not true of computational modeling: if you attempt to apply this logic when utilizing computational modeling, you will almost certainly end up arriving at wrong and uninterpretable results and, if you somehow arrive at the correct result, you will have spent much more time overcoming your lack of forethought than if you had thought your analysis through beforehand.

Tutorials

Tutorial 1 - van Baar, Chang, & Sanfey, 2019

Create a Research Question

In the context of the 1-shot Trust Game, around 90% of Trustees reciprocate the trust placed in them by the Investor even though there is nothing stopping the Trustee from giving nothing back. What we want to know is why that is.

Thus, our goal is answer the following question:

What motivates people to reciprocate trust in single-shot interactions?

Tutorial 2 - Galvan & Sanfey, 2024

Create a Research Question

In society, attitudes towards redistribution (taking from the rich and giving to the poor) vary and the relationship between benefit from redistribution and support for it are not consistent. We want to know why that is.

Thus, our goal is to answer the following question:

In scenarios where resources are allocated unequally, what motivates people’s decisions to either redistribute or not?

Tutorial 3 - Crockett et al., 2014

Create a Research Question

We often have to make decisions wherein we can experience more discomfort, or harm, for greater rewards or, alternatively, less harm for less rewards. But how does this harm-payout tradeoff change when we have to make decisions to harm others for our own benefit? We want to know why.

Thus, our goal is to answer the following question:

Are people more harm-averse when they are personally harmed or when someone else is?

Tutorial 4 - Li et al., 2022

Create a Research Question

Our notions about what a fair distribution of resources is often differs from others’, particularly when considering existing states of wealth. In these situations, is equality fair? Or avoiding harming people? Or preserving existing hierarchies? We want to know which (or all) factors are considered.

Thus, our goal is to answer the following question:

Which norms - Equality, Hierarchy Preservation, or Harm-Aversion - do people consider in judging a distribution of resources?